Did Microsoft just promise a universal translator?

Published 10:38 pm, Friday, November 9, 2012

Geeks around the world perked up this week at news that Microsoft appears to have taken a big step toward a "Star Trek"-like universal translator.

In a blog post Thursday, Microsoft Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid wrote about the Redmond tech giant's new speech-recognition and translation technology, and how he showed it off at the company's Research Asia's 21st Century Computing event, in Tianjin, China.

Just over two years ago, researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Toronto made another breakthrough using "Deep Neural Networks" -- a technique patterned after human brain behavior -- to boost speech recognition, Rashid wrote.

Using this, Microsoft has reduced the error rate from one word in four or five to one in seven or eight. That's the biggest gain since 1979, Rashid wrote, "and as we add more data to the training we believe that we will get even better results."

Computers already have gotten much better at text-to-text translation. So the next step was to build a system that rendered Mandarin text aloud using properties of Rashid's own voice.

"When I spoke in English, the system automatically combined all the underlying technologies to deliver a robust speech to speech experience — my voice speaking Chinese," Rashid wrote.

The results are still not perfect, and there is still much work to be done, but the technology is very promising, and we hope that in a few years we will have systems that can completely break down language barriers.

In other words, we may not have to wait until the 22nd century for a usable equivalent of Star Trek's universal translator, and we can also hope that as barriers to understanding language are removed, barriers to understanding each other might also be removed. The cheers from the crowd of 2000 mostly Chinese students, and the commentary that's grown on China's social media forums ever since, suggests a growing community of budding computer scientists who feel the same way.

Of course, Star Trek's universal translator could handle languages it hadn't previously encountered, most of the time. We're still a ways from that.